


i don't wanna be your friend

by agentmaine



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Movie: IT Chapter Two (2019), Pining, Reunions, Stream of Consciousness, this is just richie being gay for 1.4k its bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22485586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmaine/pseuds/agentmaine
Summary: "If this is the start of a joke, Richie thinks to himself, the punchline better be real fucking funny."Or, a look into Richie Tozier's head while he remembers that he's madly in love with his childhood best friend.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 5
Kudos: 55





	i don't wanna be your friend

Richie Tozier finds himself sitting at a table, a mountain of food in front of him. That’s normal. There are people surrounding him at the table – also normal. The people surrounding him are his childhood best friends, and that _should_ be normal, too, for a reunion. But it’s not. Instead, he’s pushing down the panic rising in his chest because as of a few hours ago, all of this was lost to him: Derry, the Losers, his entire childhood, all one big, forgotten blur. Years of memories, the defining years of his life, all washed away down the sink. His adolescence slipped from his mind, growing weaker and weaker the higher the mile count ticked in his shitty old car that took him out of Derry all those years ago, never to return.

Until now. He’s back, at a Chinese restaurant with the people who meant the world to him, who he loved so terrifyingly much, the people who he had apparently made a fucking _blood pact_ with and then somehow, conveniently, forgotten about.

He takes a moment to glance around the table – shit, how do you forget a fucking blood pact, he thinks. How do you forget the people you love so much that losing them would be like losing half of yourself?

And somehow, worst of all, as unsettling to Richie as the old forgotten but familiar fear he feels deep inside his bones, is the issue presented in front of him: Eddie fucking Kaspbrak.

If this is the start of a joke, Richie thinks to himself, the punchline better be real fucking funny.

The group have been sat together, all of them – almost all of them, at least, Eddie reminds himself – for about half an hour. He works overtime to keep up the funny-man act, to be the comedian he always was and now is by trade, he guesses, and to look at all of his friends equally. He wants to look at them all, he really does. He wants to pause the moment so he can stare at them properly, look at each and every feature on their faces and stare them out. They’re all so dreadfully fucking old now, real adults, functional or at least semi-functional people, with the lines and bags on their faces to show it. The years have left their marks on all of them and Jesus, some of his friends got hot. It’s unfair!

There are more pressing issues, though. Although he _wants_ to look at all his friends in turn, he has to force the eye contact and force his head to turn away from the one point in the whole room that his eyes want to lock on to.

Eddie. Fucking. Kaspbrak.

Across the table, Eddie is still listing off potential allergies. There’s a cuss every other word. There’s that same hot-headedness that time apparently couldn’t tame and Richie, deep in his heart, is so, so glad that the years didn’t wear away. There’s so much different and so much the same. His eyes still have that same _something_ about them that he cant tear himself away from and Richie has to stop and take another shot before he begins to wax poetic. Richie Tozier, as he has known himself for the past two decades, is not someone who does that for anyone.

Or maybe he is. Or could have been,

Richie takes another long look at Eddie, attempting subtlety, and with each blink, breath and second that passes another memory flashes in front of his eyes, as sharp and painful as a knife in his side and he curses himself silently because how could he ever forget? To love someone so deeply, with every inch of his being, and it all to be forgotten. The man across the table is the boy he looked at through those awful, thick-rimmed glasses, long lashes blinking at him in the sun and bickering, always bickering.

To fall in love is a slow process. Richie has never once believed in love at first sight. If he looks at Eddie now and thinks back hard, past the block that’s still there, pushing through the headache, he remembers it taking a long time. Part of that was it taking so long for it to be seen as love because, well, shit. Being gay wasn’t a thing then, for him. It couldn’t be, he didn’t want it to be, until it was already there and he could no longer ignore it. He remembers the fall as slow and painful and endless – whenever he thought he had fallen and landed on “fuck, I’m enough in love now,” the idiot would say something about an anxiety or an illness and he’d fall deeper.

Over the course of a dinner, Richie realises he has fallen in love all over again. Or, actually, remembered that he never stopped being in love. It hurts him and heals him and terrifies him and all he wants to do is kiss Eddie or punch Eddie or down his drink, get in his car and drive so far away.

Thinking back, he was so deeply, woefully in love. Looking back with the eyes of an adult and the sense of someone not a complete fucking virgin, despite what he would have claimed back then, he remembers that he was so painfully obvious about it too. The _touching_. They were always fucking touching. He looks at Eddie – Eds, he was always Eds and he always hated it – and he remembers walking home from school in the low-setting sun and bumping into him just to have that electric moment of contact. He remembers being so young and so scared, never certain if Eddie felt the same, if that nudge was intentional, if the glances lasted as long as he thought they did, if that look made him feel the same way, butterflies rising up.

He smiles to himself, trying to hide it by looking at his feet, as he remembers the hammock in their den and Eddie climbing in alongside him, for no fucking reason other than, well… the reason he hoped so dearly for.

Or should that be hopes, now, he wonders?

Richie tunes in for a moment, cracks another joke to keep himself involved, and lets his gaze linger on Eddie for another moment too long as the floodgates continue to break against the tidal force of memories.

He never wanted a friendship. It was always more that he wanted, so much more, as much as he could get. Richie knows he is selfish and he knows he always has been, when it comes to those he loves, and he was selfish with no one more than with Eddie. Every laugh brought out of him from another sparked a fit of jealously so sudden it would knock the wind out of him and he’d fight for a joke to get any reaction he could.

To remember who essentially is the potential love of your life? It’s a weird fucking sensation, Richie thinks to himself. His foot drums a rhythm under the table, uncontrollable and rapid and spiralling as fast as his thoughts. The tapping of his foot and the thudding of his heart go in tandem and all he can think about is _love_ , the all-encompassing feeling suffocating him, long forgotten. He was under the impression that, at 40, he had never been in love, but the fact was that he had _always_ been in love, with the same man he loved when he was thirteen, with someone he couldn’t even remember, is potentially even scarier.

In the past, he’s been with people. Never for long, never anything too serious. He had always thought something was missing.

Richie takes another long, solemn drink and watches as Eddie throws his head back in a fit of laughter, the smile lighting up his face and his eyes gleaming, mischief in mind and at the tip of his tongue as he yells a _fuck you!_ in response to some comment made by Bev.

With a sigh and a shake of his head, Richie settles himself back into the conversation, trying to catch up on decades of missed memories, piece together the reason for the dread settling in all their stomachs and address the much more pressing situation at hand.

He does so with the terrifying knowledge in the back of his mind that it wasn’t _something_ that was missing in his life. It was a _someone_. And he’s right back in his life once more, right across the table.

**Author's Note:**

> richie: spends 10 minutes pining silently over his best friend  
> richie, tuning back in as mike drops the phat pennywise reveal: oh fuck bro you ruined the vibes
> 
> anyways thank u for reading!


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